The kids have been enjoying Baba is You, and watching them brought back pleasant memories for me of playing the classic crate-pushing game Sokoban. So I went looking and found a very nice project that has collected 300 classic publicly available Sokoban puzzles. Then of course I had to get it on my phone so I could play it anywhere. The result is the sokoban.love client.

On a technical level, with sokoban.love I've finally managed to figure out how to scale modifying programs on my phone beyond the tiny scripts Lua Carousel supports. Carousel treats each 'page' of the carousel as a separate script, and shares the screen between the code for the page and the drawings the page makes. When you switch between pages, Carousel saves and restores code for you so the script currently on screen is always the one currently drawing.

sokoban.love comes bundled with multiple pages of code (including 7000 lines for all the levels; those would be a pain to copy paste into Carousel). The pages all collaborate to create the app; switching pages changes nothing about the code that is running. The screen is also no longer shared between the app and its code editing environment. When you run the app the Carousel menu disappears, replaced by a single button to exit the app and edit its code.

This approach works well for editing on a phone. The trade-off I made is to jettison the live-editing experience. You can still get that with sokoban.love, but you'll need to get on a computer and connect driver.love to it like all my Freewheeling Apps.

As a bonus, sokoban.love includes a simple solver to eliminate some gruntwork for moving the player on touchscreens that you can see in action in this video. Tapping on the buttons along the edges moves the player a single square. Tapping on an empty square moves the player there if that is possible without moving any crates. Tapping on a crate and then an empty square will try to get the crate there if that is possible without moving any other crates.

Comments gratefully appreciated. Please send them to me by any method of your choice and I'll include them here.